I feel like it would be good for my friends and community if I briefly explained why I believe what I believe here on Easter weekend. Or probably a better way of phrasing it is "how do I know that I'm not deluding myself?" A friend recently asked me that question, and it is a good one to ponder. All are welcome to comment. I will obviously be touching on things very briefly, but I would like to start a conversation in this direction, as many other people have recently started other conversations in other directions.
In summation, I believe what I believe because the Holy Spirit has enabled me to trust in Jesus for salvation and has taught me who Jesus is and how He died that I might live through the Bible. I can trust the work of the Holy Spirit in my life and the words of the Bible because of reason, history, experience, community, and hope.
Reason
If you take the Bible as it is and believe that Jesus died and rose again for your sins, you wind up with a fairly self-consistent worldview. There are innumerable variations on this worldview, of course, with varying degrees of difficulty therein. Yet the answers to the biggest questions humans have always asked-- why are we here? why do things happen the way they do? how ought we to live?-- are answered in a pretty satisfying way. There are logical arguments for God's existence that may be helpful to some people, but I don't think they're particularly useful except as interesting knickknacks within this worldview. You cannot start with or end with reason when it comes to believing in God, but I don't think starting with or ending with reason gets you anywhere. However, I don't think it is a stretch to say that just about everything within this framework is reasonable & self-consistent; very few ways of understanding the world meet this very basic test.
History
This is a point wherein one could spend days and days arguing about archaeology, textual criticism, and who knows what else and get nowhere, but I will simply say that there is ample evidence to suggest at the very least, that Resurrection of Jesus happened like the Gospels said and lots of other things about the Gospels are trustworthy. If that really happened (and that's a big if), there's good reason to take the rest of the Bible seriously, since that's what Jesus did. There are lots of difficulties with taking the Bible seriously, and while I cannot say I have thought about them all, I've encountered quite a few. I would be happy, either publicly or privately, to discuss them. The big thing, though, is (again) it is still reasonable to subscribe to the theory that the Bible was inspired by God, that Jesus rose again from the dead, and that you do not have to abandon your intellectual credibility to believe in Jesus.
Experience
Oh, what a nebulous entity, our experience! While I do not think it should get as strong a value as reason would in processing life, I think it is still important that what we believe correlates with what we have experienced. And in this regard, I will say that unless my mind is oriented with Gospel thinking-- that is, that I am a sinner saved only by grace and transformed by love-- then I will either think too highly of myself or too low. I will either be faced with the horrors of my selfishness, pride, and condescension towards others or I will lie to myself and allow those things to consume me until those things define my interactions with others. And the more that I trust that Jesus has looked at all that ugliness and chosen to exchange that ugliness with His beauty, the more that those things lose power in my life. I am able to forgive, sacrifice, and love over and over because Jesus does, and He has shared His strength with me. Living in a "dangerous" neighborhood, moving to Africa, and dealing with annoying people are all so much easier when I consider the weight of glory that comes with knowing and loving Jesus. Furthermore, I cannot love by myself-- usually what comes out then is just my selfishness looking for more attention or, if it approaches being genuine, it is quickly exhausted when I run out of energy. But if I connect myself to the wellspring of love and receive from Jesus' love, I can continue to love even when it hurts.
Community
This is really an extension of the last paragraph-- over my short years on earth and over the centuries, communities of Christians have done incredible things. This is not to say that you have to be a church to do good for others, or all communities are a blessing to their neighbors. Lots of non-Christians do way more good than other Christians, and some churches are simply poisonous and wicked. Yet I think that across the board, when you encounter groups of Christians who take the entire Bible seriously, they are not only accepting enough to take in any sinner, they are also challenging enough to transform any such sinner. Their love leads them to sacrifice in ways that others don't do on nearly the same scale, sacrificing their lives in many cases for the sake of lifting others up. I can meet a woman with AIDS in Kenya of a different nationality, language, ethnicity, and background than me-- but the Gospel brings us together and we can rejoice together. I have been hurt, loved, built up, challenged, forgiven, and shown grace by these communities in many different ways, but it has all, in the end, been good.
Hope
We live in a world of evil, injustice, oppression, and sorrow. If you don't know this, you will eventually. Whether it is internal, external, or both, you will be wounded deeply as you live. And you will always be able to find someone else whose suffering was both less deserved and more horrific. For some, this is reason alone not to believe in God. For me, it is impetus to believe-- for if God is not sovereign and is not going to bring justice to all those who escape it in this life, nor is He going to make all things right in the end, how much more horrifying is the world we face! For those of us who have the privilege of wealth, friends, education, and other resources to deal with tragedy, we can eventually shrug off the harm that has been done to us. But for those who have no such recourse, it is unimaginably cruel to imagine that there is no justice or vindication whatsoever for them, that in this life, thieves and rapists and murderers will have the last word. We cannot comprehend how all things work out, and we should be careful not to treat such a matter with triteness. But I think there is a way of confidently saying that God's love is beyond our imagining and His plans beyond our realization, and in the end our feeble understanding will be overwhelmed with the beauty of His work.
So that's it. I have found that listening to Tim Keller has been very helpful in processing these issues, and as I mentioned, I am hoping this sparks conversation. Thanks for reading and participating.
[cross-posted on facebook.]
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16 comments:
I think for me, right now, I'm struggling most in the "Experience" area. The question you started the post with, the question your friend asked you, is the same question I ask myself: "Is this all self-delusion"?
After spending a few months on that question, I don't think it is all delusion. But, I think I am most susceptible to self-delusion in the area of Experience. I've looked back on my life and their is nothing that points specifically to God, at least as far as I can tell.
With human psychology, it's very easy to make something real to yourself by believing it. If I believe God is the source of Good, and something good happens in my life, then of course I will believe it came from God. But what if I don't believe that?
I don't want to delude myself into interpreting my Experience a certain way, if I have no reason to interpret my history that way. I want God to be real in my life, without me having to make him real. And I just don't see that yet.
Ryan,
Thanks for responding. It is no secret that I have struggled with doubt and continue to ask myself if I am deluding myself. I think that one can just as easily delude oneself into thinking that God doesn't exist, and we ought to be cognizant of that. My faith was always the strongest when I fellowshiped with other Christians and continued to engage in ministry, even when I felt so broke and useless that I couldn't continue. And there were a lot of times like that where God continued to use me.
I am curious by what you mean by "there is nothing that points specifically to God, at least as far as I can tell." What are you looking for or hoping to see?
I can agree with you that it is easy to delude one's self the other way as well. I'm been trying to hold myself in a middle ground where I can honestly explore thoughts, feelings, experiences, and arguments. It's not easy.
I know what you mean about faith being the strongest when in a strong Christian community. If it weren't for IV, I doubt my faith would have made it through sophomore year of college. But, I think it's a double edged sword, community can intensify both the positive and the negative- from really good teamwork and creative spirit to group think and cult stuff. I don't want my faith to be someone else's. I want my faith to be mine.
Which leads me to answer your question of what I mean by "there is nothing that points specifically to God, at least as far as I can tell." In Sunday school the other week, the teacher asked a warm-up question of what God had done in our lives for good, that strengthened our faith. I could not come up with anything. And, to be frank, I don't know what I'm looking for or hoping to see.
Well, God is a person right? He is incarnate as the man Jesus. It's one thing to say that you're not an atheist- that you believe in supernatural. But it's another thing to claim that the supernatural is actually a "person" who came into history, fully human and also fully divine. I want to know this person. I don't want him to be a friend of a friend anymore. I want to meet him; I want him to be my friend. Or something like that.
Ryan,
I feel like I can really resonate with your thoughts, and quite honestly it took me about four or five years to feel more settled in regards to these issues. You're in my prayers.
In regards to your first paragraphs. I am not entirely certain that one can stand in some sort of middle ground and weigh things with perfect objectivity. After all, everyone's beliefs are shaped by their experiences & presuppositions. How one person interprets various evidences is shaped by so many things. People who think that they have pulled themselves into a magical frame of reference that gives them total objectivity are usually magnanimously deluded. So I would encourage you not to be discouraged if you feel like you can't muster objectivity. I know that you said that you wanted to explore things "honestly," and I think that's a much better way of looking at things-- asking the questions, considering everything, and not lying to yourself about your feelings or experiences or beliefs.
There was a time when I felt like I had wasted my life and that if God had a plan for my life, it was either an indifferent or cruel one. Then some really good friends-- and one in particular, who really believed in the grace of God working in me when I didn't at all-- told me that I'm not defined by who I am, but who God is making me into. He repeated back to me all the things that my friends had said about how encouraging and loving I had been to them and how they saw the grace of God working in me. That was huge. Are there things that other people are saying to you about the grace of God working in you that you have a hard time believing?
I think that wanting to be Jesus' friend, and not just a friend of a friend is really huge and really good. How are you going about making friends with Jesus?
[this is a really good conversation, but we can always move it to phone/e-mail etc. if you would prefer.]
I know I'm coming late to the conversation, but this post really piqued my interest. I found the following comment to be rather problematic:
". . .for if God is not sovereign and is not going to bring justice to all those who escape it in this life, nor is He going to make all things right in the end, how much more horrifying is the world we face. . . But for those who have no such recourse, it is unimaginably cruel to imagine that there is no justice or vindication whatsoever for them, that in this life, thieves and rapists and murderers will have the last word. . ."
My question is how you can believe both this and the Bible? The Bible teaches that many (most?) of those who escape justice in this life are predestined to hell in the next life (born into a poor Muslim family, hear little about Christianity, die of Aids/Malaria etc. and burn in hell). This is one of my major problems with Christianity. I'm frankly surprised that you would contend that ultimate justice is a reason to accept Christianity. . . I just don't see that in the Bible.
(btw, I found your blog about a year ago on the worldmag blog, and stop by on occasion)
Nathan,
Thanks for stopping by and sharing! You bring up a very good point, and it is one that I've definitely explored with friends before. It's certainly troubling to think that people who do not even have the opportunity to hear the Gospel in this life could go to hell. However, there are two things that I consider to help me deal with this tough issue. The first is the idea, supported by Luke 12:47-48 (as well as the general scope of the whole Bible), that your degree of suffering in hell is directly proportionate to your wickedness and inversely proportionate to your ignorance. C.S. Lewis has also written a lot to help expand the idea of hell to be a place where you are along being ravaged by your sins forever; I would highly recommend his book "The Great Divorce" is an excellent exploration of the subject if you are interested in reading further because one blog comment is a tough way of get all that there is to be said on the nature of hell.
However, while those ideas can make hell itself more understandable, I think the bigger question is of what I mean when I say "ultimate justice." Perhaps we might prefer it if God's justice were some sort of karmic tit-for-tat where your sins in this life got you punishments and your good deeds got you rewards. I'm actually really glad that isn't the case, because my sins against God-- and the sins of every person against God-- are simply too great to ever get me anywhere nice in the afterlife. Instead, the Bible's conception of justice is that all sin against a holy God is punished-- my lust and the genocidaire's rage-- and the sins of those who accept the free gift of God's mercy are poured out on Christ instead. So if we reorient ourselves to this Biblical understanding of what "ultimate justice" is, we find ourselves appreciating God's ultimate mercy & love all the more.
Thanks for the response.
However, I still have a problem with your view. I assume that you hold a Calvinistic view of Scripture (from your interest in Piper, Driscoll, etc). Within the Calvinistic paradigm (which I do clearly observe in the Scriptures), the ignorance (and possibly wickedness) of individuals is preordained by God, since God chooses some for salvation and the rest are left (or chosen?) for damnation.
Also, you create an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, if individuals hear and accept the gospel, their eternal state is NOT dependent on their wickedness. On the other hand, if individuals are ignorant of the gospel (which isn't their fault), they get hell regardless of their behavior, but the degree of suffering IS dependent on their morality.
Finally, I have read the Great Divorce and do find the idea that hell is how we experience God's presence to be more acceptable than the simplistic notion of an actual "lake of fire." Yet, regardless of the details of hell, it still will involve tremendous suffering. And many people will be sent there because they weren't lucky enough in the "cosmic lottery" to be born in a country where they would be thoroughly exposed to Christianity.
In conclusion, I recently commented to a friend that the universe is indescribably awful place if those who experience a life of hell (disease, hunger, rape, etc.) are then condemned to an eternity of hell. If this is what Christianity teaches, I don't see much good news.
Nathan,
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you and I hope you're still reading-- it's been a busy weekend! You did give me another big ugly perennial faith question after the last one-- namely, how can God predestine people to an eternity of hell? The answer is far too complex for a blog post, and I hope that doesn't sound like a cop-out, because it took me a couple of years of wrestling to reach anything near an intellectually & emotionally satisfying conclusion myself. I will be blunt in some of my answers, halfway because of the limitations of space and halfway because I do feel particularly passionate about the subject-- it ties into why I've been going into debt to pay for the school I go to for several years, etc. etc.
I will say (briefly) that people do choose to reject God (on some level) while at the same time God is sovereign in choosing those whom He will save. If I could explain it more eloquently than that I'd probably have more than 30 followers on my blog; even the wise, wise Tim Keller says emphatically that we don't know why God chooses some to be saved and others not. However, I think it's really unsophisticated to say that it's about winning the "cosmic lottery" and being born in the right country-- plenty of people born in the "wrong" country have chosen to follow Christ after they heard about Him through dreams, while people who have been instructed in good Christian teaching throughout their comfortable lives have still exercised their will and rejected Him. So it's about far more than just where you're born.
I would like to pick up two threads you mentioned: the dichotomy created by the Gospel (either you're judged on your works or you're judged on Jesus' works) and the lack of good news coming out of Christianity. I don't want to minimize the difficulty of the questions of predestination, suffering, & hell-- these are very real things that people of faith struggle with throughout their lives. Yet just as the idea of thinking that believing in Jesus is about winning the cosmic lottery is unsophisticated, so calling the torment & sacrificial death of Christ on our behalf a lack of good news is downright ungrateful. When I consider the outrageous proposition at the heart of the Christian faith-- that we, who are undeserving of such great mercy, were loved enough by Jesus that He would die a miserable death so that He could have us-- I can only submit in joy. There is pain; there are tears. It is not an easy submission. But if Christ has given His life for me, how else can I respond but to simply claim the grace that makes it so that I don't have to prove myself by my works?
Looking at this beautiful grace and the heartbreak of hell, there are two responses, I think: we can throw our hands up at our (at best) underinformed perception that God is too unfair for us to worship Him or we can ask ourselves what we can do to bring hope and light to the people who suffer through hell on earth now and will suffer hell for eternity.
As you might have guessed, I picked the second option and I'm going to medical school to back it up. I want to be friends and neighbors with those people. Together, we'll build up a local health system while I tell them about how unfair God is, that He would punish His own son instead of them in order that we might all be reconciled and made whole. If I do my job well, there will be pastors and doctors in a village in the Middle East 60 years from now doing my job and I'll be completely obsolete. The title of your blog is "repairing the world"-- what are you doing to pursue that? I don't ask to try to play "gotcha," but rather because I want hear your thoughts about how our concern for these billions of hurting people translates into Gospel-centered action. If my blog could be about anything in particular, I would want it to be about that. Thanks for listening & sharing!
Nathan, I'm digging your comments. Matthew, there's a difference between "We don't understand" because something is complicated (like molecular biology) or because we're too unsophisticated to grasp it (five-year-olds don't know that they don't understand the global financial crisis), and the "We don't understand" about something that is inconceivable. I don't think that a good God would make creatures so corruptible that they would be basically bad; just because you assert that God has a reason doesn't mean that it could be one that I would hold valid.
Also, you set up a false dichotomy here:
"Looking at this beautiful grace and the heartbreak of hell, there are two responses, I think: we can throw our hands up at our (at best) underinformed perception that God is too unfair for us to worship Him or we can ask ourselves what we can do to bring hope and light to the people who suffer through hell on earth now and will suffer hell for eternity."
I suppose that a Christian understanding of worship would include service and sacrifice for the suffering. What would you say of someone who both throws up their hands at their perception of God and lives charitably?
Alex,
Thanks for responding! On your first point, I really do think that understanding God's reasons for why He does what He does is more like a cross between your last two options. The 5-year-old and the financial crisis is perhaps not the best analogy; it's really a lot more like a 5-year-old and the joy of sex. It's not that the 5-year-old isn't sophisticated enough or is simply ignorant; it's just that they haven't experienced positive sexual feelings, desire, etc. in a way that makes them say, "wow! That's a really good thing." My friends with children tell me that life after having kids is the same way. If God is big enough that He ought to be running things differently from our perspective, He's probably big enough to have a justification for how He has created things. I think that trusting God to do what He has promised and redeem the world in way that is just and merciful, despite all the terrible things we see now, is simply about that-- trusting Him. And the only way that I can justify such foolish trust is looking at Jesus. If God is crazy, loving, and wise enough to sacrificial Himself for my sake and so kick off this wild story of redemption with the Son of God hanging naked and bleeding off a cross in some backwater province somewhere, I can trust Him to end it well. If He can use His own horrific suffering to bind up so many broken hearts, then He can do the same for our suffering. This is the point at which I will trot out my Fyodor Doestoevsky quote-- I know you've seen it before a lot, but I'm sticking it up here for Nathan's sake (and btw Nathan, it's from "The Brothers Karamazov":
"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.”
On your second point: Firstly, it's not a false dichotomy, because if you have thrown up your hands at the perception of God then you probably don't believe that anyone is at risk for an eternity of suffering in hell. I was mostly discussing one's response to the prospect of eternal suffering-- either you think, "well, screw this concept of God" or "gosh, there's a lot of people going to hell that need to hear about Jesus!" But to answer your question, I think lots of people live charitably regardless of their faith system. However, I think the problems facing the world require a lot more than living charitably-- they require enormous, costly self-sacrifice and genuine hope imparted to suffering people. There are a few things besides the Gospel that motivate people to engage in enormous self-sacrifice for others-- guilt, pride, adrenaline-- but after a while of feeding off them, they start to feed off you. Read any aid worker blog for any length of time and you'll see this. As far as genuine hope for suffering people-- I have argued in the OP that the Gospel is the best realistic hope for the suffering we face (although this is a big point that could be much expanded on.) And going back to the original point-- this suffering will be in service of the joy we experience in heaven, a point Tim Keller makes very well in this essay.
On point the second, yes, if the dichotomy is strictly in terms of how does one react to the idea of human damnation, then it is a strict dichotomy. (I was reading this as being about human suffering, in general, at first.)
If God is imperfect, or even downright evil, how would you know? You're right to point to Jesus: assuming that the resurrection was historical, that's fairly sensible.
The ideas that God is good and that God is real are two different ideas. If they're both so, then the Gospel is the best hope for the world. If not, then it's not.
Not that I'm accusing you of this, but to simply identify God with good, without any deliberation, is to abdicate one's responsibility for one's concept of good. The question, "If you were to find out that God doesn't exist, would you still stand by your actions?" is, I think, a fair way of framing this idea.
You are very right to point out the vast difference between the idea that God is real and the idea that God is good. Indeed, both are tested and argued quite routinely in quite different ways. However, as we have gone over several times, I think looking at the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the best stepping stone for understanding who God is and how any claims about His nature can be substantiated in anyway. And as you say quite succinctly, if God is real and God is good, the Gospel is the best hope for the world.
Your final paragraph raises a whole 'nother set of intriguing issues. It is difficult to assess my response to your question (I assume you would like me to answer it!) based on what I said in my last paragraph (and my last post) about how my desire to do good is predicated on the Gospel. God's goodness is not just the intellectual justification for doing good but the power and hope for doing so. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ aren't just God's tidy explanation of what it means to be good; they are His way of letting us see how self-sacrificial love is at the heart of life.and His way of bringing good into our hearts. If we were to assume, though, that God doesn't exist and everything that I say about hope and power is all my furious emotional masturbation combined with wishful thinking, I would probably find myself in the same boat as a lot of charitable people who don't believe in God: I would still have a vague desire to help people because it makes me feel better. This desire would crumple whenever the going got really tough, or else I would probably keep going at the same level of intensity fueled by pride in being such a "compassionate person" until it destroyed me. I can't say that I would care much about "standing by my actions" in that case, because I wouldn't have much responsibility to justify my actions to anyone but myself and the people I want to impress. Perhaps that's just a really long-winded of way of answering "well, sort of, but not really" because the Christian understanding of what is good is a joke without the Resurrection being real.
Matthew, on your first paragraph, I think we agree that we disagree.
On the second: I think there are three points here:
1 Christianity teaches that we can't even genuinely want good without God, so making moral evaluations of God is meaningless outside of knowing God.
2 Without God, you could look good, or try to be good, but you couldn't persist genuinely under adversity.
3 "Standing by your actions" must happen before an audience. If God doesn't exist, that audience is just yourself and other people.
Correct me, please, if I'm misrepresenting you.
1 I'm doubt that the Bible makes this claim severely. That is, I suppose that a sensible Calvinist would say that, theoretically, no one could want good, but acknowledge that God gives grace to everyone to see something of good, to have some moral understanding. I'm thinking along the lines of God's laws being inscribed on the hearts of humans.
I think that goodness is subjective; our close personal friend Søren Kierkegaard says "Truth is subjectivity". In the religious mindset, goodness is relative to God. It's a very Greek idea to be concerned with goodness transcending God or being independent from God's ideas. A lot of Christian theology seems to be working harder to promote this Greek concept of morality than to promote the idea that God constructs morality.
2 I think this is testable. Your milage may vary.
3 If God exists, it might be sensible to expect God to have insights about moral consistency. How could we know that God's purposes transcend himself? I don't think they can. I think that's okay. I would expect religious people to treat God's ideas about morality differently than the non-religious; God's opinion is important! However, I don't think that there is a difference between standing before God and standing before humans (including one's self), aside from God being big.
Alex,
In reading your response, I am wondering if maybe I misunderstood what you were asking back in your last post. I felt like what you were saying was, "If you found God doesn't exist, would you still have the same basic framework of morality and understanding of what is good and would you keep doing what you're doing now?" What I felt was behind that was the implication that if my understanding of good was whatever God felt like telling me today based on Him just being God, my moral reasoning was faulty (and I think that this is a perfectly appropriate assumption to make, because I think that's a bad worldview.) So I tried to defend the idea that Christian moral understanding was built on the Resurrection and that I wouldn't have much to defend if the Resurrection isn't real. If that wasn't addressing what you were trying to discuss, I'm sorry and would appreciate you re-stating what you'd like to discuss here!
1. I think that your summary of what I said was pretty accurate, but I would add that I was really more concerned with morally evaluating myself (since I felt like that was what you were asking when you said, "If you were to find out that God doesn't exist..." I agree with you that God does give grace to everyone to see something of good, but I was totally working in the opposite direction (e.g. "what if we have to figure out what's good on our own without God?") in answering the question.
2. Certainly not in a double-blind, randomized way. In fact, you would probably have to admit anecdotal evidence to get sufficient power. : ) Just read a couple of secular aid worker blogs for a few months and read a few Christian aid worker blogs (like Under the Acacias, for example) and I think you might be able to appreciate some differences.
3. I think what I was trying to say is that if God is real, I am accountable not only to Him, but also to my fellow humans in a real way because He created them and expects me to love them in some way. However, if He isn't real, my accountability to other humans is pretty much whatever I feel like, or whatever they force me to be accountable in. This goes back to the original thing about defending my framework of morality or any framework of morality-- if God's real, then a lot more matters. Oppressing people might not just be unfashionable, it could be sin. If He isn't, then there's a lot that isn't. Oppression might just be unfashionable.
Hopefully we are not spinning in too many directions now and I am answering your questions in a way that you want? I feel like you are trying to explore whether or not we as humans can look at a particular action of God, decide that it is wrong, and thus invalidate either God's moral rule or existence. I feel like that is not as simple as the average 4chan user makes it out to be, and when it comes to the grand designs of the universe & suffering, it's just about impossible to evaluate in light of the Cross. You might be able to get a little mileage about specific OT commands (there's some really weird stuff that God tells various prophets and kings to do), but I've never been wowed by how constructive such exercises might be.
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